Edevotional November 1

I found this piece on Fr. Richard Rohr’s daily devotional yesterday mind-boggling. But isn’t that what a devotional might be? Getting beyond the mind to the heart. The writing of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin does that for me. As nature continues to flow, I pray that the love at the core of our flow and evolution—that is God—to be evident ever stronger through me and through us.

“Nature is more flow than fixed, like a choreographed ballet or a symphony. Life evolves toward ever-increasing wholeness and consciousness, and something more—love. . . .

As life becomes more complex and conscious, it becomes more integrally whole. What accounts for evolution toward greater wholeness? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified an energy of centration, whereby elements unite and complexify into greater wholeness, and called this “love-energy.”

We are accustomed to thinking about love as a human sentiment or emotion, but Teilhard saw love as a passionate force at the heart of the Big Bang universe: the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements, center to center. “Love,” he wrote, “is the physical structure of the universe.” [3] It draws together and unites and, in uniting, it differentiates. Love is intrinsically relational, the affinity of being-with-being in a personal, centered way; a unity toward greater wholeness of being that marks all cosmic life. If there was no internal propensity to unite, even at a rudimentary level—indeed, in the molecule itself—Teilhard said, it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, in the human form. Love is the core of evolution.”